Into the light: the warm wisdom of Francis Ford Coppola

Fader, The, July-August, 2009 by Matthew Schnipper

* In an interview from 1991, Francis Ford Coppola anticipated a populist rise of Handycam filmed masterpieces from a "fat girl in Ohio" that would destroy the business of movies and return cinema to an art form. Now, 18 years later, he has transition ed from visionary to something more sage-like, as writer, producer and director of his current project, the starkly filmed black and white Tetro, a story of two brothers--Vincent Gallo and newcomer Alden Ehrenreich--tensely reuniting in Argentina, away from the ghost of their famed conductor father. Coppola refers to Tetro as the work he's always wanted to make, and, at 70, seems pleasantly content to never again do anything he doesn't want to.

Was it exciting to write Tetro knowing you'd be able to make it the way you wanted?

Right now, in the movie business, the only way to make money on a movie is to have a very, very enormously broad audience. So, oddly enough, the more expensive the film is, the smaller the idea has to be. But the less expensive the film is, the bigger the ideas can be, because it doesn't have to please everyone. Once you start trying to please everyone with art you're dead.

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How did you keep such a complex story in your brain?

I had one image I started with, which was the idea that this guy was hypnotized by staring into light bulbs. I didn't know what that meant, but I found that a fascinating metaphor-almost like a moth. We think of light usually as good and dark as bad, or light as benevolent and dark as scary. In some cases you can reverse metaphors and staring in the light could mean an obsession with death, because if you saw a headlight and ran into it you could kill yourself. I just started working on metaphors and knew that I wanted it to be a story of rivalry within a family-you know, biblical or ancient Greek, where you have the domineering father and you have to break away from his egotism. To greater or less extent, there were elements of that in my family, although my father was a wonderful man and a good father and I have a brother who, in truth, was a real inspiration to me, but nothing like in the story ever happened.

Was making the movie in Argentina crazily fun?

Movies are hard work. It's sort of like marriage, it's a tough and grueling experience, but if you love your wife then you can get through it, you know? When you make a movie, a personal movie, one of the big decisions is where and in what milieu you are going to make it. If it's all about tracking some guy in the alligator-ridden jungles, you're pretty much going to be in an alligator-ridden jungle for the whole 60 days. If it's about being around bohemian artists in the La Boca neighborhood of Argentina, then the day-to-day you're going to be around doing those things that you set it in.

Did it feel celebratory during filming?

All my career I wanted to make more intimate, emotional, touching films, you know--kind of where the emphasis was on the story and the acting and it wasn't necessarily going to have 52 gunshots, or garroting, or people in that type of action genre.

Did you want to take out a sense of violence, both physical and emotional?

I feel that I tried to do the violence in a metaphoric sense. It had the potential rage, emotional rage, as we often have. You know, you love your family so much sometimes you just want to kill them. It has the ambience of a horror film sometimes, but that's not where it's going. It's a different kind of horror film.

You've mentioned the difference between personal films and jobs. I can't imagine anything you've worked on not being personal.

Well, you know, it's true. The Godfather, that was a job that was offered to me. But in the course of working on material you always try and fall in love with what you've got to do. There are a lot of things in life where you're doing something for money that normally you'd do for love. Art is one of them. We'd call that a prostitute, in a way, because you're selling something that is done naturally, that you want to do. So when you're a professional filmmaker on a big level, and they suddenly say, "We want you to do this project," the first thing you do is look for something to fall in love with. Even though it didn't come from you, or it was just a job, or it was assigned to you, you still look for that part of it that you really take to heart. Because you have to make it for love, even if you happen to get paid for it.

tetra.com